"Has lower latency than" fiber. Which is not so shocking. And, yes, technically a valid use of the word "faster" but I think I'm far from the only one who assumed they were going to make a bandwidth claim rather than a latency claim.
Latency to the first byte is one thing, latency to the last byte, quite another. A slow-starting high-throughput connection will bring you the entire payload faster than an instantaneously starting but low-throughput connection. The larger the payload, the more pronounced is the difference.
ehh... latency is an objective term that, for me at least, has always meant something like "how quickly can you turn on a light bulb at the other end of this system"
Until pretty recently, throughput dominated the actual human-relevant latency of time-until-action-completes on most connections for most tasks. "Fast" means that your downloads complete quickly, or web pages load quickly, or your e-mail client gets all of your new mail quickly. In the dialup age, just about everything took multiple seconds if not minutes, so the ~200ish ms of latency imposed by the modem didn't really matter. Broadband brought both much greater throughput and much lower latency, and then web pages bloated and you were still waiting for data to finish downloading.
I think its just because ISPs have engrained in people that "speed" means bandwidth when it comes to the internet. Improving bandwidth is pretty cheap compared to improving latency because the latter requires changing the laws of physics.
If only the bottleneck was the laws of physics. In reality, it's mostly legacy infrastructure, which is of course much harder to change than the laws of physics.
